I think a lot of you are intentionally ignoring the obvious fact that you are not the target market. Yes if you care about discs, 4k and can casually throw $100 extra on a purchase the Series S is not appealing...

Plenty of people stopped buying physical media years ago (my last physical came with my PS4 Pro). Plenty of people do not have 4k displays and do not care about super high resolutions. Resolution is not what what makes a next gen experience, Ratchet and Clank looks awesome and next gen regardless of whether you're viewing it at 1080p or 4k. Plenty of people do not feel comfortable throwing big bucks on video game consoles, plenty are just casual gamers (or parents) and so typically wait years down the line to buy one at a lower price they're comfortable with. This makes the generation accessible to them from the beginning. 

Series S is easily my favorite console aesthetic design of all-time.

Final Specs

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/09/introducing-xbox-series-s/

Yeah, but also the 32X was intended to have a longer lifespan but then happened that no one cares, and almost any third-party developer ignored it. Are we sure XS will receive third-party support in the long term or just some lazy ports from Xbox X (like the current Switch)?

Is this confirmed? If so this is worse than I thought.

Maybe someone with more tech expertise can verify, but this wont just play games at 1080p, but it will also play them at reduced quaality settings than what the full consoles can handle. That ram is pathetic. there will be an ovbious drop in graphics between this and the next viable console, the PS5 D. for only $100? they must be smoking somenthing. 

"The primary difference between Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S is in resolution. Through talking to our customers, we found that many of our fans prioritize framerate over resolution, so we wanted to build a console that didn’t require a 4K TV. Xbox Series S delivers approximately 3x the GPU performance of Xbox One and was designed to play games at 1440p at 60 frames per second, with support for up to 120fps. With the increased efficiency we get from the next generation AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture combined with the virtual memory multipliers enabled through the Xbox Velocity Architecture, Xbox Series S will deliver performance and experiences well beyond the raw specs. In addition, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S share the same development environment, tools and capabilities, all of which enable developers to build and release their content across consoles more easily while still taking advantage of the unique hardware capabilities of the next generation."

Sauce for people who post in these threads without doing the minimum research.

Well that's already a no, because it can't output at native 4K. Assuming Series X|S uses those same builds for BC, Series S should instead run @1440p, which I guess would cover for that RAM difference?

Yeah, moment I posted and re-read it, realised it didn't make sense. I can't remember what RAM in One X is like, but I don't think it should make a huge difference to BC.

I'm also not sure how different the architecture is going from Xbone to Series X|S, so if a lot of them have to re-worked for those systems, or even get next-gen centric builds (up to 120fps, faster loading etc.), Series S will likely still target 1440p.

If a dev make an Xbox game, why wouldn’t they support the Series S? It plays the same games. Developers have been scaling for much larger hardware differences on PC for decades. Any developer that wants to make a PS5/XSX/PC game that takes advantage of the CPU, I/O, and SSD can easily move it to XSS just at a lower resolution and potentially with out some features like RT.

Just to get an idea of the BC, some gameplay of Gears 5 on Series S at 120fps:

Doesn't mention resolution, so I'm guessing it's probably 1440p. Lower resolution than One X but getting a massive framerate boost. I'd expect similar for most BC games.

For some 4K tvs, if you want a slightly cheaper one for gaming that doesn't have a full HDMI 2.1 port with 4K/120hz, but may have one for 1440p/120hz, Series S would fit perfectly. If you want to stream media at 4K, or if some older BC games will output at 4K, you just have to switch ports.